To Love, I Cannot Honour, Neither Can I Obey
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: AU based on 'The Duchess' Castiel is a duke, and married. But his bride is unhappy, and sleeping with the men in his household. One night, his gardener tries to protect him from seeing this infidelity. And Castiel is angry with him for it.
1. Chapter 1

_So, I'm 25 minutes into 'The Duchess' and I've had an idea for an AU. That might actually be a record. This might as well be titled – 'I love words – words are sexy'.)_

Castiel walks down the deserted corridor, the candles in their candelabras, balanced on marble topped tables, reflect a golden light on the silken wall paper. His shoes are silent on the soft floor coverings, the expensive leather, whisper light on the luxuriant pile.

Behind him, in the dining room, chatter has once again risen, following his swift departure. He has little patience for these awful political meetings, the speeches, smarmy rhetoric and backstabbing are very tiring, especially over a large meal for which he has no appetite. These men talk of freedom and a commonality between all men, but they still wear expensive tailoring, and drink floods of his fine wine, convinced of their superiority to the common men that serve them.

And why shouldn't they be? Castiel knows himself to be well above the men who trim his lawns and care for his horses. But he does not profess to think otherwise.

Hypocrisy, above all else, is what he cannot stand.

"Your grace." A voice follows him, and Castiel turns to find himself face to face with one of these 'lesser men' a gardener if his clothing is to be the measure of his character. Large, almost indecorously so in the beautiful hallway, the man has the course frame of a labourer. But, he removes his plain cap in the presence of Castiel, and nods a sort of bow – which ingratiates him.

"What is it?" Castiel asks.

"A moment, if you please...there is...a small matter of some importance..." The man seems nervous, and Castiel does not know why.

"A gardening emergency?" Castiel is perplexed, and he is most tired from wine and dull talk, he really does want the comfort of his bed chamber above all else. "Can it not wait until morning?"

"I..." The man begins, his eyes going to the door just to Castiel's left. The door that opens under their combined gaze. The door to the bedchamber of his wife.

And now Castiel realises, with a great swell of horror and dismay, what is about to happen.

He had married a lady, of a good family. Lilith Tamberly. Now his duchess, and a welcome presence in his life, which had been so dull and dry without the possibility of children. And dryness, as he had become aware through mutterings at court, was likely to incite fire, which would spread, and devour quickly.

Oh yes. He knew what they thought of him, or what they had thought. But no longer, he had a wife, a beautiful thing of life and energy. And no more would he tolerate rumours that he was anything less than the perfect husband, and a fine figure of contemporary manhood.

But, Lilith had so far proven...far less than what he had been promised.

And now, as the door opened, and light spilled out onto his expensive carpet, the sounds of whispers and rustling fabric with it, the scent of wine chasing like a cheap perfume...he knew, that once more, his wife had made a fool of him.

A man appeared in the hallway, sliding through the door, clutching a bundle of his clothes. Footmen's uniform. He froze on seeing Castiel, and Castiel stared at him, feeling his insides turn to stone.

"Get out." He murmured, and the man ran, bare as a newborn, fleeing his masters wrath.

Castiel pushed open the door to the bedchamber, and found his bride, his wife, on the bed, in only her scant shift.

"What is the meaning of this?"

She looks at him with nothing but scorn, and a kind of bitterness that wounds him.

"Were you planning on coming to me tonight?" She challenges.

Castiel had not been with her since the night of their wedding, and he feels helpless, angry under her accusing eyes. He cannot answer.

"What difference does it make, for him to have me...when you do not want me?" She tells him.

"Madam, you mistake yourself..."

"No, I mistook you – for a man, and a husband...when you are neither."

Castiel knows that other men would strike her, send her away, have her locked in an upper room and denied food until she learnt her place, breaking a woman as a trainer breaks horses. But he is not a savage, and he is not a man like that.

He turns, feeling his heart pound in fear, fear that he has been discovered, when he thought all was well, and leaves the bedchamber. Despite himself, he is still angry, but angry at the world, at cruel circumstance that placed him here, on this green earth, incomplete.

The sight of the gardener makes him jump, he had forgotten him in the discovery of another of his wife's infidelities.

"She set you here to spy?"

The man shakes his head.

"I was returning tools, outside, your grace. I...I saw the duchess bring the footman through from the kitchen." His eyes leave their rightful place, on the ground, and reach Castiel's face. A look of familiarity. "I thought that perhaps you would like to be spared the sight of...this indiscretion."

"I was aware." Castiel says stonily. "Your pitiful attempt at subterfuge did nothing but embarrass us both."

"Your grace..."

"You are not my equal." Castiel snaps, raising his voice and striking the other man dumb. "It is not for you to...spare me, whether from the truth or from anything else. Remember your place."

The man swallows, and, Castiel feels a dart of consternation when he sees, not only humiliation, but also anger on the other man's face.

"I was trying to help you." The man utters, his face a darkness that robs light and beauty from the very walls around it. "I should have expected your lack of gratitude."

And with that he turns and walks away.

Castiel feels anger tear through him, unwarranted, shameful anger, but anger that has at last found a target. He follows the man and seizes his shoulder, turning him and pushing him back against the wall.

"Gratitude is not yours to demand. You, are in my employ. You have a place in my home and this-" he indicates the walls around them, "Is not it."

The man is silent, and Castiel feels victorious.

Then he speaks again.

"You have a place." The gardener murmurs. "And it is not here, it is in there, with your woman. You have shamed yourself, and now seek to blame me for an error born in pity."

Castiel has struck him before he knows it, and the sheer unexpectedness of the blow throws the other man's head sideways against the silken paper.

"Do not pity me." Castiel hisses, and realises that he is pressing him into the wall, holding him there and looking on him, his jaw clenched in anger.

The man takes a breath, anger in every line of his face, green eyes burning with it, and the scent of smashed and razed woodland creeping from him as fury heats his skin.

"I pity you."

Castiel hits him again, and deals him a third blow swiftly. But then, the other man catches his hand, and does the unthinkable, he turns, and throws Castiel to the floor, sitting over him, and holding him in place.

Castiel, breathing heavily, is almost incandescent with anger. "You...are to leave my house, immediately."

"Then now, you have nothing with which to threaten me, and that is a poor move on your part." The man almost snarls.

Castiel, heart swollen with fury and bitterness, spits, "I am a cuckold in my own house, I am no threat to anyone, whether they labour for me or not. Which of you hasn't already trespassed here? And taken my wife in my place?"

The man glaring down on him looks away, and Castiel's pain is redoubled.

"Do not, pity me." he says for the second time, though now with less anger, it feels more like a plea. "I can't bear it."

"You won't be happy, until I hate you?" The man seems distinctly amused by this, reaching up to touch his own bruised and bloodied face.

"It's not your place to like me." Castiel says, though he can't quite muster the imperiousness needed to accompany such a statement.

Surprisingly, the gardener laughs, a rough little sound. "Fine words to hear from a man on the ground, without a friend in his whole estate." He bends down, pressing Castiel gently into the carpeting. He whispers, "It is not for you to tell me who I may or may not like, nor for you to tell me what I may or may not do...though there are those that would tell me that I cannot do what I would, with those whom I like, but who they say I should not."

Castiel is dizzied by this reasoning.

"That being said..." Castiel begins. "perhaps you ought not to do what they say you shouldn't. And perhaps you had better direct your attachments elsewhere." He finds the words hard to get out, mostly because it seems he cannot catch a breath, and the weight of the man atop him is distracting, like a gulp of potent liquor.

"But the one I like is so...very...pleasing." The man's voice is all but a whisper, soft and slow against Castiel's ear. "And the things I would do with him..."

Castiel swallows, and looks up at him. This is dangerous, so very very dangerous.

"And how do you know, of his pleasingness?" Castiel queries softly, feeling his body shift and stretch on the floor against his will, as if he is a cat, preening.

"In addition to liking who I should not, and doing what I should not...sometimes, my position in the house affords me the opportunity to gaze on what I should not." The man tells him.

Castiel's breath catches.

"The curtains at your bedchamber window...are wonderfully sheer." The man whispers.

Castiel's whole body shivers, and he feels at once, as if he has been killed, and also brought to life, by what the man is insinuating.

"You may not be happy, until I hate you...but I will not be happy, until you know that I could not, in fact, ever hate you...your grace." The man continues. "So the question becomes...which one of us, is the most honest with himself?"

"I fear it is not me." Castiel murmurs, finding the words deep inside of himself, and letting them free. "I fear I am an atrocious liar, even to myself... how might honesty feel? I don't think that I have ever seen it, in anyone of my acquaintance."

The man draws back, helping Castiel to his feet.

"Honesty is more of an acquired skill...I would be happy to tutor you." His hand travels from Castiel's own, along his arm, and down, cupping a waist held in expensive silk, heat floods Castiel's body, and he cannot for the life of him move away from this man, this second. Let the fire come, it would not burn as fiercely as this.

Castiel draws them both to his bedchamber, locking the door behind them. It is as he and the man who has found and dragged out the spark of life in him, are tumbling onto the antique bed on which Castiel was born (and on which he is soon to come to life again) that Castiel asks, in a whisper half lost in flesh.

"What may I call you?"

And because he is so polite, and so honest. The man decides to answer likewise.

"Call me Dean – if it pleases, your grace."

"Castiel."

Dean smiles, a smile found in savouring the deepest of pleasures. "Castiel." He repeats.


	2. Chapter 2

_Smut, smut, smut. So many dirty fruit metaphors – gotta catch 'em all!_

It is strange how, even without clothes, they are still so much apart, so very different to each other. Their classes seem to be evident, down to even their scents, and the feel of their skin. Dean is rough with scars, calluses, rough from the very garments he clothes himself in. He smells like green wood and split bulbs, like grass and air and all things free. Not in the sense of their being under no dominion, but in that they cost nothing, and yet are truly _owned _and inhabited by the man on his bed. He smells, in a word, cheap. But undervalued for being so, given the wealth of majesty that lies in him.

There is nothing cheap about the way Castiel sees Dean at this moment.

He would not sell the feeling of Dean's skin on his for any amount of gold or favour. What better favours could there be than those bestowed upon him by a mouth as lush and soft as that of well treated silk? Dean's mouth alone would set him back a small fortune. And what price was there for the full weight of him for Castiel to sit astride of? For the soft hair at his temples, the way his teeth feel against Castiel's lips?

Dean rolls them over and breathes against Castiel's neck. "You make me tired, thinking so much about so little."

Castiel runs his hands over the broadness of Dean's back, as he would over a horses flank. "I don't call this a little matter...this is...perhaps the largest undertaking of my whole life."

"I'm flattered indeed." Dean leans and takes soft bites of flesh, his kiss swollen lips capturing Castiel's throat right down the centre, making Castiel feel like a tender morsel, a soft candied fruit perhaps, being relished and tasted before it is devoured. "That I'm considered so notable of proportion."

Castiel's breath is stolen from him in wicked humour, and he turns them again throwing Dean out on the bed like a captured slave in some foreign, erotic painting. With his arms stretched out over the richly embroidered bed linens, his legs slightly parted, all of his body a sinuous continuation of line and muscle that belies his class, his almost mongrel beginnings, Dean is all that has been burning in Castiel's heart of hearts for these past years.

Castiel looks down on him, unable to keep a look of wonderment from his face.

Dean looks up at him, unflinchingly, and Castiel does not know what he sees.

"This is what you want?" Dean murmurs, moving one leg wider, framing Castiel's kneeling form with his long, vaguely crooked legs. "To take me?"

Castiel is unable to say a word, but gazes on Dean's form and thinks how deeply, heavily satisfying it would be to feel all that bulk shuddering around him, under him, as he grasped Dean greedily about his great back and chest, feeling the pull of pleasure taking him far, far from everything but Dean himself.

Dean's eyes search his face, finding Castiel's as black as sloes.

"That, is what you want." Dean says again, only this time it is not a question. "With the power you hold day by day over this house. Over when my body rises from sleep, stops to eat, stoops in work. Over when and where I lay my head, and what my hands are busy with from dawn to dark rising. And now, you've taken me to bed, to be inside of me..." Dean's body moves upward, a long movement, his hands running down Castiel's arms to take his fine, unmarked hands in his, and bring his master down on top of him.

"So that there is nowhere you have yet to take control of, and nothing I can do without you having had some part of me. You who own my days, my service...now you want to own me, take out of me your pleasure."

Castiel, almost drawing his breath from Dean's lungs, so close are their faces, a wealth of heat between them the perfection of Dean's body a bed carved by God from some divine flesh beneath him, utters, "Yes."

"You are not my better."

Castiel riles. "I'm master here."

"But you, are not better than me." Dean breathes. "You were born in blood and you'll likely die in it, a disease or clotting that stops your heart in this sainted house." Dean meets his eyes squarely. "But you and me were born equal, and it is only your family's wealth, your name that put you here. That may give you the right to order me to and from your gardens...but this...here..." Dean lifts his body a little, touching it to Castiel's, an offering, a comfort. "I give you this because it is my body, born mine, and something that you cannot take from me...the most valuable thing either of us have – the only thing that cannot be bought – our God given skins."

"God gave us our bodies equally for this, did he?" Castiel murmurs. "But then did he not intend always for me and my family to own you and yours? Did he not put us here for that?"

"God set the king upon the thrown, and made him infallible." Dean says, a teasingness in his voice. "Perhaps he does not think like you and I."

"Hush." Castiel says, the blasphemy warming his skin. "This talk of God and kings here, when there is nothing beyond that door. No one but us, and nothing but our bed."

"Does that not make you God? Most powerful of we, the only two." Dean jokes, and his face is lighter when he does, Castiel finds he likes it.

"And you the second, the king." Castiel whispers, moving, lifting Dean's hips, rubbing his intimate part against Dean's buttocks. "And I shall set you on a throne."

Dean lets out a sound, something like Castiel's flesh would utter if his skin had a hundred tongues with which to voice its longing. Castiel draws away a little and looks at Dean as he would a newly acquired piece of furniture. Only Dean is not some cold concoction of wood and filigree, he is like nothing else. Castiel's hungry eyes feast, and his mouth is not far behind, tasting first one of the buds on Dean's chest, then the softness just under his ribs, the warm give of his belly, and the deep ripeness of what lies between his legs.

Dean cries out, and Castiel tastes, like a starving boy suddenly faced with an orchard of ripe fruits, hot from the sun. Sucking their piquant flesh until juice runs down his chin.

There is something bestial about him when he abandons this delightful activity to once more press Dean's body beneath his. As if he has tasted the fruit forbidden to man by God, as if he has lost his reasoning to it.

He turns Dean onto his well laved stomach, hearing the other man's heavy, happy moan at the action. There should not be beauty in the view between the legs of a man as he lies, wanton, on a foreign bed. By Castiel admires him, the smooth, luscious curve of his backside, the root of his prick, which itself is furrowing the sheets. And, when Castiel reaches forwards, parting flesh as he would to seek the dark stone in a soft fruit, he finds the unassuming pressure point that will undo them both.

Strange, that such a base thing, something so crass and biological, should be the source of so much desire. The cause of his revelation at Dean's beauty.

Dean buries his face in the embroidered sheets, his cries lost there as Castiel takes a bottle of oil, a balm for the nerves, and applies it, privately stirred by the sight of the shining liquid creeping into Dean's body.

When he enters there himself, he pulls at Dean's body, bringing him up, until the other man is resting in his lap, himself deeply seated within him. With a shaking sigh, Castiel urges Dean into a smooth ride, bringing their bodies an agonising inch apart, before claiming him in heat again. All the while that Dean moves for him, Castiel is stroking his skin, fingers sifting through his short, brown hair, trailing over his full lips, into his welcoming, warm mouth, trailing spittle over Dean's chin, down his throat, which flutters wildly with his racing heart, over his chest and down, fondling him until Dean loses the self control that had brought them this far, shuddering and heaving – dropping from Castiel's lap, slumping to the bed on all fours. Like an exhausted hound.

Castiel sweeps Dean's arms up, holding them against the man's back, pushing him down onto the bed, his face meeting the sheets, eyes closed, mouth slack and uncomplaining. Everything he wants in those minutes can be found in Dean's body. Everything.

In the moment that he wants to be in such a state forever, he is undone.

Exhausted, their bodies no longer a tormented pleasure for the other, but rather a comfort, they lie on the sheets, Castiel's fingers tiredly tapping the flesh of Dean's hip, where his cheek lies.

"You're wrong." Castiel says, the first true _words _to leave him in quite some time.

"How am I wrong?" Dean asks. "Aside from this obvious flaw in my design?"

"In saying that I am not your better." Castiel tells him. "I was not born like you - for I was born here, and being born here, makes me better..."

"Luckier. Fortune was your godfather, coincidence your godmother."

"Then I am lucky, for being born above you, means that I can command you."

"You cannot!" Dean sits up and glares at him. "Command me then. Command me to leave you, and I will go, because I don't want to be here, in your bed, any longer. But, command me to be yours, to lie with you as you tell me I am lesser – and see if I choose to...bare myself for you again."

Castiel touches Dean's furious face, and adores the quick jerk of denial in the other man's brows.

"I will not command you to go. Neither will I command you to be with me. But, I can command you. I can command you to consider us equal, to believe in me and _my_ belief that you are worth more to me than I myself. And so you are not beneath me."

"You think I am worth so much...and yet you will lose me, let me leave this room like a torn shirt off to be mended, and I shall not find my way back."

Castiel embraces Dean, taking them both to the pillows and holding him there.

"I was born lucky, and, so fortunate enough to have the means to keep what I value, safe."

"And you would keep me safe? Locked away for private viewing? Like a canvas?" Dean mutters, "You play games with me, with words and...with power, and I am already tired of it."

"I will keep you safe, like I keep my own heart safe from harm." Castiel promises. "With me, always. In my home, by my side. Day and night. My consort, my advisor. I shall never be without you, or you without me." He places his hand over Dean's heart while they lie, curled around each other. "Because you have taken my heart, and I believe I have yours in its place. You have done this so quickly, that it frightens me, worse than all the punishments we would endure, were I not lucky, and well born enough to hold their whisperings off."

Dean is silent as Castiel feels his heart beat.

"I wish us to be men. Nothing more, nothing less than each other. And for us to love, like ourselves, and no one else." He kisses Dean's throat. "Was that plain enough for you? No games for me to play on you, does that suit?"

Dean turns over slowly, facing Castiel with the merest suggestion of a smile on his lips.

"It suits well...but, I believe I've won." Dean breathes. "As you forfeit the game."

"Then by all means..." Castiel whispers. "Claim your prize."


End file.
